As you rightly point out, Digg is becoming more of a collaborative news aggregator with the random link thrown into the mix. It’s funny how they’re becoming like a user-powered Spotplex. We’ll see how this saga turns out. Either way, in the long-term it’s their loss and not ours.

Luckily, I can survive without Digg, but it’s a damn shame for all those smaller quality blogs who saw Digg as an opportunity to really give it all into their writing, because the payback and the attention were a great prize for their effort.

It’s also very surprising how little impact this has had on the web. Back in the day every small shift in Digg’s algorithm caused an outcry. Now, hundreds of sites are silently banned but no one seems to notice. It’s a weasely move by Digg: they didn’t do this to any of the A-list sites. Check how many times a story from wired.com was buried. There were over hundred of articles in the last week, out of which maybe 10-15 were buried, and those were only obvious duplicates. Based on the negativity of Wired towards Digg, I’d estimate that some of their stories get buried a lot, but actual burying by users doesn’t seem to matter any more.

On the topic of baron.vc, I enjoyed your recent articles, especially the interview with Digg’s favourite photographer. Keep up the good work.

Anybody with a fascination for Web 2.0 websites owes it to themselves to check out how USAToday, the daily national newspaper, has redesigned their website. They’ve basically taken a huge leap ahead into the social news future.
Who knows if that …